Are movies getting longer? Here's the data

Marvel Are movies getting longer? The year's biggest blockbusters, "Batman v Superman," "X-Men: Apocalypse," were both over 145 miutes long, and several critics took issue with the 146 minute runtime in the otherwise excellently reviewed, "Captain America: Civil War."

Dr. Randal Olson, an expert on data visualization, posted original research to his site based on IMDB's film database. Surprisingly, he found that the data supports the opposite: overall movie length isn't actually growing.

Here's what he found:

Dr. Olson compiled the runtimes from the 25 most popular movies each year from 1931 to 2013. Take a look:

IMDB/Dr. Randal Olson The data reveals two major shifts in movie length. First: from 1950 to 1965, average runtime for top films rapidly increased, gaining about 20 minutes on average. Dr. Olson hypothesizes that competition from television pressured movie studios to produce longer epics that would bring people to theaters. Classic epics like "Ten Commandments" (1956, 220 mins), and "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962, 216 mins) were released in this time period.

This upward trend reversed between the 1965 and 1985. During this period, movies lost about ten minutes in runtime. In his post, Dr. Olson points to the rise of home video. There's no definitive answer, but it's entirely possible that studios wanted to keep movies under two hours so they could easily fit on VHS tapes.

These two shifts are important because they help explain why we tend to think movies are getting longer.

"Between 1985-2000, feature films grew back to the same length as in the 1960s," Dr. Olson explains. "This may explain why it's usually Millennials (born 1980-2000) complaining that movies have gotten longer than they used to be: If you grew up watching movies in the 1980s, they have gotten longer for you! Meanwhile, Generation X-ers are shaking their head at Millennials wondering what the heck they're talking about (as usual)."

Movies aren't arbitrarily getting longer so much as they're returning to a status quo set in 1965.

Notable exceptions are films competing for Academy Awards. Speaking with The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers said studios are afraid movies with runtimes under two hours won't be taken seriously come Oscar season. "Hollywood studios believe movies are weighed by the pound when it comes to Academy thinking. If it ain't long, it ain't winning," Travers said.

The chart below looks at all films in the IMDB database (excluding Bollywood) between 1906 and 2013.

IMDB/Dr. Randal Olson Dr. Olson found that, as a whole, movies aren't anywhere near as long as the two-hour plus standard seen in best picture contenders. Of the ten films nominated for best picture in 2016, eight were over two hours long. And even the longest movies don't approach the runtime of classical epics before 1965.

For reference, here's a look at the length of the ten best picture nominees for 2016:

Overall, it seems, big budget epics will keep you in the theater the longest, though your standard popcorn movies will probably be less of a drain on your time. And as long as studios equate runtime with critical acclaim, that isn't likely to change.